Another remarkably unremarkable day of dog walking: apparently we set a record for the day's high, someone told me. The old record was 37°F and today was 52°F. Whatever, it was positively tropical for January. Apparently we're in for a return to something approaching normal tomorrow, with snow, and Thursday will have a high of 15°F. So that's all right then.
I walked back to the office after lunch with Tom at the house, and then home from the office after dark. I have only a few regular routes, really only six variants I regularly use. Maybe seven. But there are probably a hundred possible variants I could take in the three blocks over, 10 blocks down grid I need to cross to get from work to here.
Something similar is true for getting Daniel to school. That one I do experiment with a lot, with maybe ten different variables... but some of them I just never use, for not other reason than force of habit.
If you want to snare a rabbit, or really almost any animal, you find its little, regular track in the fields or forest. Probably every land animal that isn't migratory has them: formed originally as the easiest way around obstacles, and eventually forming their own little network of paths. They say Boston's original street grid was formed by cow paths. Probably apocryphal, but believable.
Isn't it odd, though: even when we live within a semi-rational, orthogonal street grid (I say semi-rational, because I cross 18 1/2 Street on the way to the office...), we still form our own cattle paths on top of that grid.
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